


The Human Stain

by Tevere



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-20
Updated: 2007-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-09 18:28:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/90271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tevere/pseuds/Tevere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is suffering for a crime he has no idea he has committed, for being something he has no idea he is -- and though she wishes she could, she cannot feel pleasure in it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Human Stain

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Norah for beta.
> 
> You probably need to have seen the episode 'Michael' for this to make sense.

"Again."

There is a livid red mark on his cheek from the back of Teyla's hand. Under the redness the skin is slightly scarred, the only physical sign of his former shape. The scars are faint enough to be the pocks from any number of common childhood illnesses, but Teyla knows better. She can see the teardrop shaped openings in her mind's eye with a clarity that makes her nauseated. Half-turned away from her, Michael touches his face gingerly.

Energy flows into Teyla's body, a feverish thrill that oscillates through her warming muscles. She doesn't bother to telegraph her punch. He sees it too late-- twists aside awkwardly, slowly. She hits him in the face again: the jaw, this time. He's flesh and blood under her knuckles, yielding with a snap. She's barely breathing hard. Her hand tingles.

"Again," she commands.

He has half a breath in him when she knocks his head back. He makes a strangled, pained sound and she finds herself pausing coolly before kicking him in the stomach. He drops to the mat, then curls groaning into himself like a wounded animal.

The room is quiet except for his pained breathing; the Colonel's men are silent at the external doors, their guns resting heavily against their thighs. Michael is still on the mat. She knows he is stronger than this. Faster. She has seen him backhand a man with enough force to send him flying three bodylengths. There are still two Marines in the infirmary with grievous injuries: a cracked head, a splintered lower leg. The guarding Marines haven't forgotten the sins of the wolf, though they're courteous to the lamb in their care, polite with a patronising edge. And it is Teyla's job to provide physical therapy, to help him find the limits of his new body. For _her_ to know the limits of this human body he wears.

She has given training, physical therapy to some of the Marines before, and an hour with Teyla usually leaves them spitting curses and apologies in equal measure.

Michael has not cursed once.

"Oh man, I think I'm going to throw up," he says, instead. His human voice is light, boyish, broken now in discomfort. He could be any man, but he is not. He is not a _man_. He is so curled into himself that she can only see the quivering curve of his spine through his standard-issue black shirt, vertebrae barely smoothed by muscle.

"No you are not," Teyla says, sharply. She tells herself that the edge in her voice would be there with any of Colonel Sheppard's men. It is the nature of therapy to be cruel to be kind. "You can do better than this. I have seen you in battle, and this is _nothing."_

Her words have power over him: they pull him to his feet as though he were a puppet on a string, his pale arms shaking and corded. He stops the shaking with a discernable effort and shapes his human face into the expressions he obviously expects her to see: exhaustion, trepidation.

He is stronger, she reminds herself. He can take more.

There is no sign of resentment or anger in Michael's expression as she calls, "Again," louder and harsher than necessary. Cruel to be kind.

Michael's movements have a strange artificial heaviness to them, a concentration of power in his shoulders and arms that fits poorly with his medium-sized frame. Even his neutral stance is off-balance, top-heavy as he circles warily around the disarrayed mats. His body is refusing to realise its new form, Teyla notes clinically. The outward traces of Wraithness can be purged, but the reflexes are bedded as deep as a tick in the skin of a dog's belly.

Her mind's eye calculates the fight effortlessly, and her actions feel like afterthoughts. His face is human as she hits him again, and a splatter of liquid flings violently onto the mats.

Michael makes a sound through clenched teeth, a human sound of pain. He sinks to his knees slowly, doubling in on himself like an exhausted jack-in-the-box. His brown hair is short and spiky in the way of the Earth men, and rivulets of clear sweat snake around his arms, crossing and running into each other like strands of genetic code.

Teyla's eyes flick involuntarily away from his crumpled shape. They meet those of one of the guards; he gives her a minute nod. Approval. In the Earth idiom: Fuck that asshole up. She looks away quickly, finding herself breathing hard even though there is no good reason for it. There is no satisfaction in her as she looks back down at Michael, her vanquished enemy who thinks she is his friend; her enemy who could not even fight back, who stood up uncomplainingly again and again for her fists.

Teyla reaches down and pulls Michael to his feet, wrapping her fingers around his wrist and feeling a strong pulse, his muscles trembling finely against her fingertips. They stand facing like that for a moment-- his bruised and bloodied face more expressive and human than Teyla's feels at this moment. She is still wearing her plastic mask, frozen into a smile. "You are doing well," she says, and her smile does not falter even as her mind supplies: _Better than I am._ The new flush of emotion is easy to identify: shame.

He may not remember his past acts, cannot be held responsible for them -- but despite his human shape he is not human, she automatically reminds herself. Perhaps there are some emotions humans and Wraith share. Hate, anger, suspicion. But friendship, pity, mercy, compassion, love -- even guilt and shame: these the Wraith cannot feel.

Michael shakes his head ruefully, winces, and settles for a one-shouldered shrug. "Something tells me you're just being nice." She had not noticed these gestures of his before, the boyish self-effacement. His human body is not ageless as his Wraith body was. She had expected the transformation to produce a man-figure of some sixty summers, twisted in vile hatred in every nerve. But Michael is young.

"Are you injured?" Teyla asks. She feels a pang. Pity, she thinks. Or guilt.

Michael moves his jaw from side to side experimentally; Teyla can hear the click from where she stands. "I've been better." He tilts his head and then surprises her with an oddly sweet grin. "I think." He pauses, and then his grin wavers. "You know, everyone else around here treats me like I'm this deranged invalid who's gonna crack at any moment." He looks away briefly, and when he looks back his gaze is clear and steady, pinning her. "But you treat me normal, and if that means kicking the crap out of me-- I'm fine with that."

"Michael--" Teyla says. The word 'normal' drives through her to the quick, rustling up shame, pity and guilt all over again.

"So I'm traumatised, I get it. I don't even remember who I _am._ But even McKay said that being captured by the Wraith isn't all that unusual!"

Teyla opens her mouth, nothing comes out. _Oh, Rodney,_ she thinks. She shakes her head, a minuscule motion.

"So why am I so different?" Michael says helplessly, and Teyla finds herself searching his face for Wraithness and sees only human confusion.

"It is normal for you to have feelings of difference and isolation while the amnesia lasts," says Teyla, and it almost feels like a betrayal as she spins the fiction, the empty words, around him like a spider's invisible web. "It is exceptionally difficult to be a part of a group without memory of your past relationships with other individuals."

"And what if I never get my memory back?"

_For all our sakes, I hope that is the case,_ Teyla thinks. She is not a scientist like Dr. Beckett nor a student of the human psyche like Dr. Heightmeyer, but she can see some of the horrors of the possibility.

"I am sure it will return," she says, out loud. His expression doesn't change, but she can feel his disappointment; something about it compels her on, almost as though he really were the human friend of their shared fiction, and makes her quietly add: "There are always some things about our past we would be glad to forget."

Teyla projects calm truthfulness as Michael searches her face. His eyes are the light colour that none of her people are born with, though some of the paler-skinned Earth people are, and in them there is nothing reminiscent of the yellow unblinking hatred of the Wraith.

After a moment, Michael's shoulders slump and he looks away. "I guess." He is still looking away as he says, "Why did you come to Atlantis, Teyla?"

"Dr Weir is a fine leader," Teyla says. "It is hard to find good leaders who are willing to face the Wraith for the sake of all the galaxy's peoples, not just their own."

Michael looks back at her. "Where are your people?"

Teyla knows the question is innocent, but she has to consciously force herself to relax. The instinct to protect her people is a part of her like her blood, her breathing. "We have no homeworld," she says, and giving the words life makes the pain real all over again. "And we are not many. A dozen families in total."

He frowns. "Why?"

The question is so absurd that a laugh is forced out of her like a bitter exhale. "Why else are human children left without parents in this galaxy?"

"The Wraith," Michael says slowly. His expression is indecipherable.

"The Wraith killed my people, thinking of them as no more than cattle fit for slaughter," Teyla says harshly. "My people asked for mercy, asked for the Wraith to spare them for the sake of their children, and instead the children saw their parents murdered in front of them." She finds her heart beating faster; takes several deep breaths to calm herself-- does not mind that Michael notices and his face changes into something approximating empathy. Let him see the toll the Wraith have taken upon us, she thinks. Let him see our suffering, even if he cannot feel it. "The Wraith have destroyed everything my people were. They have taken the innocence of childhood, our identities, our _right_ to live without fear and suffering and the constant threat of death!"

She has to look away. Michael's voice says from beside her: "I'm sorry."

Teyla looks at him, into his clear human eyes, and understands at that moment Ronon's desire for him to _remember_. It does not seem fair that he alone should have been gifted with forgetfulness, that easy artificial innocence. She wants him to remember the slaughter and cruelty, and she wants him to have the capacity to experience and truly understand suffering, regret, pain; wants him to live as a human with the knowledge that he has taken a thousand human lives. So that his suffering might, in a tiny part, equal theirs.

But at the moment he is suffering for a crime he has no idea he has committed, for being something he has no idea he _is_ \-- and though she wishes she could, she cannot feel pleasure in it.

\-------------------------------

  
Teyla saw her first mortally wounded man at the age of eight; since then, the carnage of the battlefield has become second nature to her. But when Michael strips down to his sleeveless undershirt for their practice session, she feels a visceral tingle of uneasiness rattle under the top layer of her skin. "What is that?"

Michael's arms are red raw from wrist to elbow, patterned through with darker spots where blood has seeped and formed scabs. The redness forms long parallel streaks of variegated colour on his normally pale skin, like the marbling in a side of meat. Some of the more clearly defined cuts are deep and turning yellowish at their ragged edges: the preliminary signs of infection. Instant horror draws a cold sweat to her skin in a heartbeat. The drug has failed.

But Michael surprises her with a pained half-smile and says quite normally, "Woke up this morning with half the skin on my arms under my fingernails. Pretty impressive, huh?" He sighs and scrubs at the side of his face in another one of his oddly human gestures. The ugly facial bruising Teyla inflicted only two days ago has healed already. "Dr Beckett thinks it's an allergic reaction-- like maybe I've gotten sensitive to soap or laundry powder or something. Happens, apparently."

Something about the way he says the last makes Teyla say, "Do you think that is not the case?"

Michael makes a face. "Hey, he's the doctor. But... I don't itch." He hovers his fingers above the surface of his arm, as though testing, and then curls them abruptly into a fist. He pauses, looking down at his hand, then says flatly, "This'll sound crazy."

"Please," says Teyla. Her neck prickles.

"I--" he breaks off; laughs shortly. "Yeah, it's crazy, but I think the Wraith _did_ something to me. More than just knock me out and break my arms-- something so fucking terrible that I can't remember it, but my subconscious can." He looks at Teyla, and all she can think of is that his anguish looks so real that maybe it has to be. There is no hidden calculation in his voice, no hint of understanding, just rising panic and barely contained horror. _"Why else am I trying to tear the skin right off my own body?"_

There are more lies Teyla could say, but she does not. Something -- pity, perhaps, or compassion -- pushes her past her instinctual revulsion to touch his shoulder in a wordless gesture of comfort, but before she can make contact he flinches almost imperceptibly. She stops as though stung. It is a strange hurt that she feels for him, her enemy, a hurt that she has perpetuated herself: that he should be hated by those he thinks are friends, and the only human contact he should know is the kind that causes pain.

Michael is clearly unaware of his own movement; he looks from her uplifted hand to her face with a lightning flash of well-masked puzzlement. It is the look he always gets when faced with new elements of human culture: at Colonel Sheppard's sarcastic quips, Rodney's fumbling attempts at small talk. It is the look, she thinks, of a man lost in the dark near a cliff-edge, never sure if he is going to live or fall with each next step. She lets her hand drop.

"None of this feels real," Michael says hollowly. Pain etched on his new-again face. "I _know,_ intellectually know, it's the PTSD, but I feel like I'm living a nightmare. I keep hoping I'm going to wake up, but," he laughs helplessly, "it's day after day of... _this._ I don't have a past. I don't have a future. I know the way everyone looks at me, like they hate me." He pauses, then says with a slightly bitter inflection: "It's like everyone else knows my original sin but me."

Teyla frowns, says carefully: "Your original sin?"

Michael looks at her, tilts his head as though realising, then reaches into a pocket. "Sure. I guess it's an Earth thing." Teyla's wariness subsides as he withdraws a tiny, worn book; weighs it thoughtfully in his hand. "Apparently I'm quite a reader," he says, then grins doubtfully as though not quite believing it himself. "Though I guess you would know that better than me."

"Actually, I did not," says Teyla, honestly. It makes sense, though: that Colonel Sheppard would fill Michael's room with dead men's books, as well as their clothes and photographs. "May I see?"

She is holding a dead man's book, but the new inscription on the faded coverleaf is to a man who never existed.

_To our beloved Michael,  
Resist the temptations of evil, and follow the path of good.  
Love,  
Mom and Dad_

Teyla recognises the writing as Colonel Sheppard's lazy scrawl; can see his ironic grin as easily in her mind's eye as though he were standing next to her. It is a cruel joke, and the shock of it makes her slip, to say quietly without realising until after that she has said it at all: "We should never have done this to you."

The horror of realisation overwhelms her like a plunge into icewater. When she looks up, Michael is regarding her steadily. He is not a great deal taller than her, and she is aware of his almost animal physicality, the alien intelligence behind the familiar shape of his features.

But Michael looks away after a second. He rubs both hands up the sides of his face, as though trying to rearrange his features; runs his fingers distractedly through his spiky hair. "You didn't do this to me. The Wraith did." Of this he sounds certain. This one thing he thinks he knows.

The Wraith do not give mercy, but humans do. They should not have done this to him, Teyla knows this. They should have been merciful and given him death. Even an enemy does not deserve to have their identity stripped from them, their very essence changed into that which they are not.

Teyla is a diplomat, a negotiator, a liar. And she knows the best lies are those with a kernel of truth, so she allows her real regret and pity colour her voice as she says, "You were too new, too young for the mission. We did not know what the consequences would be."

Michael's face is still in his hands; he does not look up. "We're at war," he says, without inflection. "I did what I had to do."

\-------------------------------

  
Teyla finds, somewhat to her surprise, that she has begun to deliberately allow a quiet moment before their sessions for conversation. It is not a routine she had intended. But there is a certain relief in Michael's bearing whenever he enters the training room, a vulnerability that strikes her as different, and Teyla has experiences of her own with Heightmeyer to suspect why his counselling sessions deliver little of their promised reassurance.

It would be easier to feign Colonel Sheppard's discouraging abruptness, and then she would not have to perpetuate this fiction that she is finding increasingly distasteful. But Teyla has seen those who would ignore a stranger dying by the roadside; those who do not wish to have their own lives made unpleasant by an understanding of another's misery. Their selfishness, their disregard for charity and compassion, leaves her cold. Strip the pity, mercy, compassion from a man and you may well have a Wraith, she thinks, and the thought makes her frown, disturbed. But there are other differences, too. To draw too close an analogy between their two species is an exercise that even she can see is dangerous.

If Michael were a man she would say he was introspective: constantly thinking and analysing. She is not sure how to label the personality of a Wraith; whether or not a consideration of individuality is even apt for a creature whose natural state is closer to that of a garden wasp than a human. But perhaps in their hives they are all this way, and his characteristic for interior thought is no more unique to him than the habit of Earth humans to talk loudly and constantly. But his quietude is dangerous for them: it means the experiment is unmonitored.

Michael's arms have healed overnight, leaving only pale scars that are barely distinguishable from his natural skin tone, but he radiates tiredness. Shoulders slumped, face drawn. Teyla takes one look at him and says with immediate real concern, "You have been having trouble sleeping." Not a question. She knows the sleeplessness all too well, its lingering effects in the days that follow.

That he has been dreaming of the Wraith is disturbing. But he does not find these dreams comforting, Teyla thinks, and is herself comforted by that.

"Listen," she says, and this time she does touch his shoulder; feels him stiffen uncertainly under her hand, not even knowing how to receive this small comfort. She does not know if Wraith touch, but he has a human body now. Perhaps it can understand her reassurance even if he does not. "Many people here have had such dreams. You are not the only one."

Michael looks at her, and again she feels that quick intelligence assessing her; is again reminded how she must not underestimate his perceptiveness. "You've had the dream too," he says, slowly.

"Yes," says Teyla quietly. "Many times. And I know how frightening it can be."

And perhaps her reassurance has some effect, for his mood is more buoyant as she leads him through the drills she has designed for the day's session.

"Defend, defend, parry, strike..." She is running at an easy half-speed, demonstrating and stretching herself through the unfamiliar moves rather than actively attacking, and he blocks the first few of the sequence before she floors him with a neat crescent kick.

He takes it manfully, muttering, "Ow."

"Now you try."

Michael has his hands on his knees, catching his breath, but now he laughs. It is a pleasant light sound, this boyish, likeable edge to his personality that is such a consistent surprise to her. "I can't do that move."

So you do not recognise it, she thinks, but only says: "Oh yes you can."

Michael gestures easily. "All right." He is so willing to try and please her that she cannot help but feel oddly flattered. She has had to teach him the other drills over and over again, but this time is different: he runs through it without error, his movements certain though slow. Far more natural than anything Teyla has seen him perform so far. So her theory was right: something in him remembers this. She blocks his final strike easily, but he is pleased.

"Hey," he says, smiling up at her, surprised at his body's cooperation, and before he has had a chance to recover she has launched into the same sequence as before, but double-time. The moves she has choreographed fit together like a dance, fast now, both of them breathless and warming with sweat so that their skin slides a little on each contact. Michael blocks her deftly, unthinkingly-- something has clicked in him, switched a light that animates him with alien fluidity. He catches her wrist effortlessly and laughs; her theory has worked perfectly and she is half-afraid and half-flushed with the exhilaration of the fight as she pulls back and moves into the next steps in the sequence. He blocks again, and this time when she goes for the crescent kick he grabs her leg. And she is flying for an instant, grounded only by his hands on her, before the impact with the mat slams the air from her lungs and leaves her half-dazed and panting.

Michael's hand is pressed against her breastbone, his fingers grazing the bare skin of her neck. She gasps; he will be able to feel the fast rise and fall of her chest, she thinks, the double trip-time of her heart as her body vibrates and hums around the hammering flow of its blood. He is a Wraith and also a man, or more properly neither at all. Visceral dread twists hotly inside her and she twists along with it, feeling her skin slipping against his palm-- his touch is light and hot, hardly pinning her down if she chose for it not to, and the visceral tingle vibrates bigger, turns into a quiver that sets her insides on fire with wrongness and slinky pleasure and heat.

Michael gives an elated whoop, and Teyla feels a jolt; wonders if he is catching her excitement or if she is catching his. She is breathing harder than the situation warrants, whiteness of over-oxygenation bursting in her vision, and his face above her is shining with this tiny thing of being able to fight again-- the most unimportant truth of his existence, but the only thing he has.

"Wow, you were right," he says, and his grin is amazed and infectious. "I can't believe that I actually--"

There is a horrible sharp confusion above her, Ronon's huge frame sweeping through the room like an ear-shattering destructive force of nature and hurling Michael out of range of her vision. Even as she is twisting to her feet with the dangerousness of a wounded lioness she hears Michael smashing against the wall; hears the whine of Ronon's gun being armed.

In the split-second before she has breath, Teyla sees them reversed like a sun-blindness image: Michael hissing into Ronon's face, his white Wraith-dreadlocks flying instead of Ronon's dark ones, Ronon's feet kicking in mid-air before he lands a blow that sends their huge interlocked bodies smashing into the bulkheads, and then Colonel Sheppard saying coolly from behind, "Hey, asshole!" and the Wraith is falling out of Ronon's grasp and onto the deck.

And then Michael is human again, agonised and choking against the inexorable pressure of Ronon's forearm, and Teyla finds herself screaming at Ronon with ice-cold fury until he shakes his head sullenly like an reprimanded cub and disappears. Michael falls.

"Michael--" Teyla starts, but has to turn her face away from his incomprehension.

"I'm sorry," he says helplessly, and his racheting gasps almost make it sound like a sob. "Sorry."

The brush of his fingertips against her neck lingers, burns.

\-------------------------------

  
Michael is tightening the straps of his wrist guards with his teeth, left then right with a neat precision that seems almost ritualistic.

Off Teyla's look, he says, "Don't I usually wear them? They were in my closet." He flexes his fingers thoughtfully, turns his hand over to examine the unshielded palm. "They're... comfortable," he says, almost to himself, then tilts his head as though trying to determine the origin of the feeling.

"I have seen you wear them before," Teyla says carefully. Her mind flashes to the armoured gloves the Wraith wear, protecting the wrist and fingers while leaving the palm free for feeding. "Though I believe their primary use is to protect the wrists while lifting heavy weights."

Michael grins uncertainly, the way he does whenever he asks about who he was. "Did I like doing that?"

His lost expression stabs at her. "I believe so. You were quite... competent." She smiles at him, and knows he can see her pity. "But strength is not all in a fight; agility, flexibility, speed-- these count also."

"Sure," Michael says, but Teyla's blow is already flashing towards him. It skids off his shielded wrist and thumps into his shoulder. He starts in surprise but recovers quickly and grins, shedding the uncertainty of moments before, and then they are moving, spinning, _fighting._

He is fast now, adapting to his new weight distribution quicker than she expected. Standing taller, moving more freely, and there is an alienness to his movements as he circles, familiar but vaguely horrifying in this human shape. The strange heaviness in his shoulders has smoothed into a tightly controlled power, a sideways fluidity and speed that bends almost effortlessly past her defences. He is inside her guard, his body slick and elusive under her fingers as she wrestles for a grip, and they are twisting breathlessly together like eels, feet skidding long wet streaks on the mats as they turn and grab and slip past each other. This is Teyla's skill, her _element,_ and she sees the moves clicking in her mind ahead of their actions as though they are playing high-speed chess-- feels each handhold and stance flowing through her one after the other like she is the conduit rather than the origin, power arcing and pulsing and making her stronger, faster, fast enough to match him. He is stronger, heavier, but she is faster and more agile, and their hands slip against each other as they struggle then spring apart.

Michael is laughing, panting, and Teyla can still feel the touch of his skin against hers as they circle, two equally-matched predators stalking each other with something that is almost not play. He is warm, sweaty, human-- she can see the flush of blood in his muscles, nothing like the corpse-like pale green of Wraith skin. The room is warming up with the familiar smell of exercising bodies and maleness, and she feels hot, alive, dangerous.

They trade off again: a flurry of spinning and dodging, gasping breaths, the thud of flesh against flesh. There is excitement in Michael's eyes: he remembers this. He is panting, grinning, flushed with exhilaration. But it is not the blood-lust Teyla has seen in the eyes of deranged men, nor the expressionless cruelty of the Wraith before the kill-- it is life, living-in-the-moment aliveness, and for a moment he is just _this._

And now they are sparring in earnest, both of them reacting rather than planning ahead, faster than she has sparred with anyone in practice-- as fast as a real fight, mind on autopilot and adrenalin invigorating every nerve. She has the edge: she knows how he fights, and he is running on blind instinct. She can fight him as though he were Wraith, even though he is not; knows instinctively which way he will move, how his power is centered in his torso and right side-- hits him fast on his left, and fast again, slipping through his guard and forcing him back. Her lungs and thighs are aching, a half-noticed fact, but she is pressing him back and it is _easy,_ she thinks with triumph then gasps because his hands are catching her wrist unexpectedly-- and then she is blindsided as he twists her in a move she could not have foreseen-- a move that somehow both alien and human. Her arm flares in pain too quick to register and she is caught against his chest, his arm at her throat, and there is heat between them-- so much heat that she is burning with it, shaking.

Teyla can feel Michael's muscles contracting as he lets her down, her back pressed hard against him. And there is no stink and coldness of Wraith about him, just the catch in each of his ragged inhalations, his heartbeat, the heat of him against her bare shoulders. And she is quivering with a reaction that is not all from the physical exertion. Disgust and half-fear mingled with an autonomous reaction she cannot control: arousal.

His hands are still on her upper arms, and she does not think he realises as he strokes down to her forearms, lets go. She feels his fingers on her skin after they are gone, as though he has marked her.

They are both breathing hard. The curves of Michael's pectorals and nipples are visible through his soaked shirt, muscles in his arms emphasised with the rush of blood, pupils dilated with arousal. And there is something else there as well: an intensity that could be hunger; makes her shiver. But more than anything else he looks confused. Teyla does not know what arousal is like for a man, but it cannot be that different: complicated, intense, numbing and sensitising at the same time. And it is all new for him.

The silence between them snaps like a cord as Michael averts his eyes, asks: "Where's Ronon?"

"He is not here." Yesterday Ronon was Teyla's guardian against herself, but today he is absent and the room charged with dangerous possibility, like the sky before a storm. Ronon has been avoiding her-- she knows the purity of his feelings about this experiment, how he has interpreted her actions as a betrayal. He carries a white-hot loathing of the Wraith within him like a flame, and it has burnt the harsh black and white lines of an acid etching into him, given him a clarity of purpose that is half to be envied and half to be feared. Ronon does not feel pity or mercy for the Wraith, even this human one-- he _cannot._

And at this moment Telya feels envy for Ronon, that he does not feel this turmoil of feeling that clouds her judgment. The threads of her emotions are inextricably woven into their opposites like the warp and weft of cloth, creating the complex, shifting pattern of something that shivers through her insides and dissolves her like the cool liquid touch of the Asgard's transport beam.

"He's protective of you," Michael says, with the same sudden diffidence as before, and this time Teyla recognises it: the wary yet hopeful look of a young male treading on the dominant male's turf, drawn inevitably onwards by the strange chemicals of attraction and desire. "You and he are..." He frowns, visibly searching for words to describe the concept he does not fully understand, then his expression clears into resigned acknowledgement. "Is that how I've pissed him off?"

Teyla almost wants to answer _yes_\-- would have if she thought it could provide him a moment's relief from the thought that he is hated without reason. But she realises that even Michael, who cannot feel human emotion, can know the difference between petty jealousy and the deadly, unswerving intensity of Ronon's hate.

"Ronon is like my brother," she says firmly instead, half-expecting Michael to be unfamiliar with the concept of families, the fundamental and inexplicable debt of obligation between parents and children and between brothers and sisters. The thought that an entirely different species can have an understanding of this aspect of human life is ridiculous, yet Michael's momentarily blank expression suddenly lights up with a recognition so instantaneously beautiful it cuts her to the quick.

_"Brother,"_ he says with a child's easy, unforced amazement, searching her face as though he can find answers to himself there. There is something akin to joy as well as doubt in his expression as he says gropingly, "I have... brothers." And then less tentatively, as though tapping into an underlying current of knowledge he has always had: "A mother."

There is no dawning realisation in his face, but the way he says _mother_ makes Teyla shiver: there is the mingled devotion of a child, brother, lover in his voice-- a blurring of all human familial links into a concept so profoundly alien that it makes her skin crawl with the disconnect. Wraith who are willing to die for the sake of a single look from their Queen: that is their loyalty, she tells herself sharply, that is Wraith love, and it is based on mindlessness and fear and cruelty. Perhaps they do feel, and perhaps Michael misses his hive brothers and his vicious, cruel Queen with a longing he would think was love if he could remember, but it is not the same as the human emotion-- _cannot_ be the same, because he is a Wraith.

That he is truly suffering, though: this she cannot deny.

Michael makes a sound of frustrated confusion that is almost a groan; rubs the heels of his hands against his closed eyelids as though hoping the world will be different when he takes them away. "None of this _fits,"_ he says, and when he opens his eyes they are as haunted as those of a man who wakes to find his family taken by the Wraith. "_I_ don't fit." Teyla thinks he means to laugh, but the sound is more of a gasp that catches in his throat as he says helplessly, "I know I deserve this, _but I don't know why."_

And she always thought it would be the rational thought of pity or compassion or mercy that moved her to touch him, but instead it is quick harsh instinct that presses her mouth hard against his. A kneejerk reaction to a pain that is not purely pity or sorrow or compassion or mercy or fear or desire but _all_ of them, and perhaps it is as much to stop her own suffering as his.

Michael makes a surprised noise and his mouth opens under hers. Their kiss is rough, awkward, almost violent-- Teyla does not give him time to think, to _learn;_ guides him instead with the cues of her lips and tongue and body. They are reacting on instinct, one to the other and over and back again, creating a single self-sustainable loop of existence in the interaction of their two bodies. Michael's lips, alien enemy lips, slicking and sliding against hers with increasing confidence and eroticism, and almost without realising it Teyla finds herself gasping and wet-mouthed; is surprised at the speed with which the arousal of the fight is reawakened. The strokes of her tongue sliding past Michael's are tangling them together with a heavy physical heat that builds and sparks, that crackles like electricity and jerks them apart, each of them reflexively touching their wet lips with their tongues. Teyla can still taste him. Feels the press of her wet singlet against her breasts like a caress.

Michael's expression is slightly dazed, and Teyla realises his hands are grasping her hips as though she is his anchor in this false reality they have cast him adrift in. He does not even know what the feeling of attraction _is,_ she thinks -- does not know the feelings that are first nature to natural-born humans: the rapidly beating heart and shaking limbs; the feelings of flying and falling simultaneously; how in the human body desire is only a single shift away from fear, disgust, horror.

His voice is shaking, lips still damp and darkened from pressure, and he says with half-terrified desperation, "What _is_ this?"

And Teyla feels no hesitation, no fear, as she says simply, "I will show you."

\-------------------------------

  
The door to Teyla's room slides shut with a half-sentient murmur. A disapproving murmur, she thinks, as though the city itself senses Michael's origin and wishes to protect her against him. _There is no need,_ Teyla projects back to Atlantis; wonders if she feels the muffled echo of an all-encompassing alien consciousness answering, or if it is her own imagination. But it is not she who needs protection: it is Michael who needs protection -- against all of them, against himself.

Michael is standing silently behind her, and she is hyper-aware of his physical presence. Not a jumpy awareness of his alienness, of prey in the presence of a predator, but a very female awareness of his body -- of his solidity, masculinity, the post-workout heat and scent radiating off him. Teyla turns; finds him looking around with wary interest. The niche lighting glows through the thin drapery that she has covered everything with, blurs the intricate designs of her Athosian hand-crafted furniture into something warm and strangely dreamlike. She has always felt more comfortable softening the Ancestors' hard aesthetic into something more organic, more alive, but now she wonders if Michael also feels more comfortable here than in his own spartan quarters. If, perversely, this small half-Athosian, half-Atlantean space reminds him of his home, his living and breathing hive.

He is unresisting but frowning slightly as Teyla draws him closer, her palms prickling and sliding from the heat of his skin-- and then he is just a _man_ breathing unevenly against her, chest broad and solid against hers, his hands slowly coming around her. A fraction of a second of claustrophobia, of wanting to shake herself free, but when she consciously relaxes she feels a complicated rush of pleasure: a shiver of wrongness, subverted. And it does not matter whether or not Michael can feel her shiver: everything of this is strange to him and he cannot tell the autonomous reactions of pleasure from those of fear. Even for her they are confused, intermingled into a strange continuous emotion that burns inside her and makes her tremble.

To his continuing unspoken question Teyla says, "Amongst my people we consider this a gift," and it feels like she is explaining it to herself, to Ronon and all the others, as much as to him. A gift of love, compassion, forgiveness, tenderness, although like all things it can be turned from its original intentions -- can become a gift of competition, revenge, hatred. Teyla does not understand the Earth humans' insistence that the act of sexual relations is special or sacred in and of itself. All human actions have meaning only by virtue of those who make them: by their emotions, their intentions. She picks her words deliberately, even though she knows he will not grasp her full meaning, and says, "Like any gift we can choose who we give it to, and for what reasons."

This is her choice, for her own reasons, and she does not expect to feel regret for it. She has never been one for that particular emotion, and as a leader she has had to make many difficult decisions. But one thing she does regret with her whole being is their use of the retrovirus.

Only the very youngest children believe that monsters can be turned into princes, and there will be no fairytale ending here.

"Thank you," Michael says softly. His hands are warm and intimate against her back, and for a second Teyla almost believes the lie of the retrovirus: that this is the man inside the Wraith, an individual human personality that she could learn to know, like, trust.

He is a Wraith, will always _be_ a Wraith-- but for now he is human enough for Teyla's heart to break for him, for her to kiss him roughly until his hands tighten on her. For her to help him peel off her clothes, and his hands that are reverent on her are awkward, uncertain as he undresses himself.

They are naked on the bed together, and she consciously pushes thought away until there is no war, no Wraith, just _this._

Goosebumps rise on her skin as Michael traces his hand from her hip, up along the curve of her waist and ribcage, and he is palming her left breast with his hand, her nipple hardening under it like an extension of the shiver. Something that is almost fear twists and melts, slithers from under his touch all the way to between her legs where it throbs with her heartbeat, a hot siren pulse that makes her arch and moan. He is watching her face wonderingly, stroking her breast with his palm, skimming his fingertips around and over her tight nipple, and she almost laughs hysterically at the thought that these are the hands that have killed, but now they are giving her pleasure and all she wants is his fingers slipping inside her, stroking the pulse and making it burn brighter, higher.

Teyla covers his hand with her own-- takes it from her breast and, watching him, brings it to her mouth. Brushes her lips over his whole and unscarred palm, traces her tongue slowly along its vertical lines-- life lines, she thinks with a hot slippery rush, and Michael groans at the contact, his eyes rolling back, eyelids flickering with the frantic beats of a insect's wings. She does it again; watches tightness and slackness ripple through him, his throat swallowing almost convulsively around low unintelligible sounds that lap between her legs like tiny wavelets. She keeps him still with the pressure of her thighs, and she knows he will be able to feel her wetness and heat against his stomach as she licks his palm over and over; thinks that despite his human body perhaps he is still alien enough that this strange contact will bring him to climax. Perhaps it will bring _her_ to climax: even as her tongue slicks over him her hips are moving mindlessly in the same rhythm, and she is gasping breathlessly and rubbing, sliding her thighs over and around and against his waist. The easy power she has over him is addictive, wickedly erotic like a fine-edged knife, and it leaves her achingly wet and unsatisfied, pressing and rocking into him harder and wanting, _needing,_ more.

Michael must sense her impatience because he is straightening, shifting her weight back further along his thighs, sliding his free hand firmly, slowly along the planes of her back, pressing into her muscles, stroking and stretching them upwards with the heat of his touch. Moving from the small of her back, coaxing the slippery burn upwards from her pelvis so it flickers into her torso, charging all of her with electricity that sparks and discharges against him: her shoulders, underside of her breasts, neck, the upwards sweep of her ribs. Teyla is making low sounds herself, arching into him; she moves her lips from his palm, takes his fingers into her mouth and lets her tongue swirl down their length in deliberate mimicry of the act of oral pleasure. And virgin though his body might be, it has a man's instincts; Michael groans, gasps, and his erection kicks against her stomach.

Soon, she thinks, and she almost cannot wait. His human body is beautiful, new and unscarred as though he is a living and breathing marble statue, and like a statue there is a cool otherness about him that lingers beneath the skin.

"What," Michael says raggedly, and she likes his voice like this, "now," and his left hand is still caressing her, pulling her upper body towards him so that he can take her nipple into his mouth. Teyla gasps around his fingers, her mouth slipping wetly off him; his tongue is circling her in the same motions she used on him, and all she can feel is his hot gentle mouth and the silky throbbing demand between her legs that dampens his thighs and the sheets, enveloping them both in the smell of sex and lust.

Teyla bites her lip and then bares her teeth in deliberately provocative smile, slides her hand against his slick fingers and guides him down. "This."

Two of his fingers and one of hers sliding into her, right into the centre of the slippery ache, and the initial burst of pleasure is stunning, like parallel tracer fire that arcs into her and sets every nerve aflame.

Her neck is arched, her back is arched, her whole body is a single tight curve grounded on their fingers intertwined within her. Teyla is aware of his fascination, the slight parting of his lips, as he watches her slow twisting. His reverence, his desire to please are intoxicating -- the power she has over him, to keep him hypnotised and serving _her,_ furthering her pleasure. She continues her slow grinding, feels the roughness of the hair on his thighs against her skin, the gorgeous smoothness of his fingertips stroking into her, and she thinks she could do this forever, _feel_ this over and over and not be filled.

The room has become steamy, heated with a sex-filled luxuriousness that fills every one of her muscles with wantonness. Sweat is trickling between her breasts; they sway softly as she shifts and withdraws her hand from inside her-- presses her glistening fingers against the gap between Michael's lips. His eyes stay on hers as he slides his tongue against her fingertips, tasting her, and his other hand continues the rhythmic, teasing counterpoint that makes her whimper.

They are sitting curled together, backs arched around the secret space between their bodies, Michael's erection slipping against Teyla's thigh even as his fingers are stroking their tiny sunbursts inside her. The building pleasure makes her wild, heedless of consequences. She makes her movements larger, slides against his erection and plays him with teasing cruelty until she sees the change: raw, male instinct shaping his innocence into something rougher, hotter. Hungry. His free hand fists against her back, and the sudden intensity in his gaze makes her shiver with a thrill that is not entirely sexual; sparks a strange connection between them that spirals tighter and tighter like one of the Ancestors' impossible springs.

The connection is hot and alive, intangible but somehow perceptible-- Michael is beneath her skin and she can feel his stark animal _wanting_ as much as her own; can feel it almost as much as she can see the need on his face and in the trembling tightness of his body. And when she pushes him down and takes him into her in one smooth movement, she can _feel_ the exquisite surrounding tightness that makes him groan and bunch the sheets in his fists-- experiences it simultaneously to the breathtaking slide of being penetrated, and it is like seeing two sides of a coin at the same time, a spinning coin that spikes pleasure through her with each rotation, faster and faster until she is thrumming full of it and has to move or be torn apart.

Quiet in the room except for their gasping, the regular complaint of the mattress, the everpresent hiss-hum of Atlantis surrounding them. Teyla's hair is hanging in Michael's face, her breasts brushing against his chest as she fucks him hard-- pins him down with her hand on the curve of his pectorals, her elbow flexing as she rides him. His skin is slick with sweat, his hair darkened with it, expression half-grimace and half-wild. He bucks and arches under her; Teyla gasp-laughs and they are rolling until Michael lands on top-- pale arms shaking to each side of her shoulders as instinct guides the movement of his hips against her pelvis.

Their rutting takes on the violence of a fight, except this time Michael is deep inside her and hitting her sweet spot as they tumble, Teyla's legs wrapped around him with crushing force. She is strong enough to balance his unconscious aggression, to flip him onto his back and fuck him mercilessly when she sees the hunger rising in him. They are tangled enemies, tangled lovers, and he is no match for her-- a second's stillness before he is groaning, coming with an explosion of pleasure so intense that the aftershocks breach her mind like a crashing wall of water, and then she is dragged into her own orgasm, shuddering hard and thinking with a triumph she had not intended: _he cannot hurt me._

Afterwards she watches him sleep. He has been inside her, as close to her as humanly possible, but there is a new distance between them already. He sleeps at the very edge of the bed, curled into a foetal position with his arms tightly wrapped around himself. There is a vulnerability in his nakedness, in the tight unconscious play of muscles across his back. The way his fingers are white with pressure against his skin. Part of her yearns with empathy, wanting to hold him as she would a human man, but it is obvious that touch is not enough -- and she cannot give him his memory, his identity, his freedom. Their encounter has changed nothing; has not lessened his suffering. His shoulders are out of her reach as he twitches, and his occasional pained sound is an anchor for her thoughts as they start drifting, spiralling inevitably outwards into the spidery incoherence of sleep.

She wakes uneasily to find Michael looking at her from across the bed. The dim light makes strange shapes of his naked body; graces him with the suppressed dangerousness of a tamed big cat.

"You were dreaming," he says.

And in the dark it is almost as though the Wraith dream has a physical presence, a cold dimensionless horror that has spread from his mind to hers with the clamminess of a dead man's touch. It connects them, links them more than any intimacy could.

"As were you," says Teyla.

He is quiet a moment, and she almost thinks she feels a familiar press against her mind. Not hostile-- something more akin to the blind instinctual fumbling of an infant towards the breast. But when she searches his face, not entirely knowing what she is looking for, there is nothing more than resigned acceptance there as he says simply, "I should go. Dr Beckett says I should be sleeping under medical supervision."

Michael rolls away from her and starts pulling on his clothes. He wears the Atlantis expedition logo and the American flag on his shoulders like cattle brands, but the alienness in his movements makes a mockery of their attempt at ownership. He fits his body now, or he is making his body fit him, and the awkward clumsiness of the past few days is smoothed by an otherness that is emerging from him as though from a long sleep. It casts a still sharpness over his features that is new and almost frightening, unreadable. Masking but not entirely obviating the isolation and uneasiness she knows are still there.

"Michael--"

He pauses in the doorway, the bright corridor flaring around his edges like a corona, and she sees the shape of his head turn towards her. Behind him are the square militaristic outlines of the guards, semi-automatic pistols in their thigh holsters and hands cradling P-90s. She wants to cry out that they are fools: he has a human body now, and it will only take a single bullet to kill him.

Everything she could say is useless. He is stained with his original sin, the inescapable fact of what he is and what he will always _be._ Like gravity's pull shaping a falling drop of water, everything in him is fighting their artificial constructs to return him to his natural state. A Wraith.

He is not capable of pity, mercy and compassion like humans are.

"You were a good man," she says, low.

And she knows he can see her lie.

  
ENDS


End file.
